Album Review: Filthy Dukes

Score

Did you think Ronson should’ve stuck to spinning Jackson 5 records for

Gucci whores instead of inflicting lounge versions of Kaiser Chiefs songs on the world? Then give ‘Nonsense…’ a miss. Filthy Dukes are the male Queens Of Noize and the DJ duo responsible for Camden indie/electro night Kill Em All. Their simple three-word motto – COPY EROL ALKAN – has served them well to the Ray-Banned massives. But if Fiction think they’ve signed the British Justice here, they’ve lost the plot. The Dukes’ predictable electro-pop workouts have none of Justice’s intensity, little of SMD’s sci-fi wobble and barely a fraction of DFA’s disco knowhow. LOTP’s Samuel aside, the guest vocalists are second-division (To My Boy? Tommy Sparks? Foreign Islands?) and their hollow chants matched by the vapid ’80s posturing. FrYars’ blackhearted baritone at least lends some welcome character to standout track ‘Poison The Ivy’, even if it is similar to the Chemical Brothers’ Wayne Coyne collaboration ‘The Golden Path’. The Dukes have made a big deal out of recording ‘Nonsense…’ on all-analogue equipment to make it sound like ‘Neu! 75’. Sure, there are some gnarly synth tones, but whereas the best krautrock was made in a genuine spirit of psychedelic, counter-cultural adventure, ‘Nonsense…’ aspires only to a night of bad Es and ironic air-punching. There’s been a lot of talk in the last year or so about ‘landfill indie’, coupled with the notion that switching on a synth makes you better than The Pigeon Detectives. Filthy Dukes, though, prove that identikit indie-dance can be just as dispiriting as the greyest ladrock gruel. Time to start the campaign against ‘landfill electro’.